DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
Hypnography – Ainslie Meares
Here’s a quirky find for you – Hypnography is a 1957 study in the therapeutic use of hypnotic painting.
The author, Ainslie Meares, was an Australian psychiatrist, psychotherapist and scholar of hypnotism. He lived and practiced in Melbourne, Australia, and gained international renown for his expertise in medical hypnosis, penning a number of books. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)
The book is described as a ‘clinical study’ in the therapeutic use of hypnotic painting and related phenomena. Obviously that definition is outdated. And Ainslie himself states there’s no data. The book is rather an account of Ainslie’s observations on his patients, categorising and codifying his findings in hope that other practitioners progress ‘hypnography’.
Ainslie mentions Freud and, to a lesser extent, Jung throughout. So I’ll take a punt and claim that he’s a Freudian/Jungian therapist. To my mind, hypnography is an inspired blend of the two: long, deep psychoanalysis (or hypnoanalysis), including all the sexual repression stuff, meets interpretations of dreamy, self-generated symbols.
Hypnography was borne out of a session Ainslie was conducting with a patient in hypnoanalysis some years prior to this book. The patient, “deeply hypnotised,” seemed to be unable to say something and so Ainslie suggested he draw it instead. The patient was then asked to explain/interpret the drawings – still while hypnotised – and Ainslie was impressed with the results.
After various experiments with pencils, crayons and colours (nope), a standardised painting and hypnoanalysis technique emerged – which is what’s presented in this book.
The subjects are a mixture of private clients and patients of a psychiatric department of a general hospital. The ‘meat’ of the book is the paintings, first grouped into broad categories and interpretations, but later into poignant, and sometimes disturbing, individual cases.
Here’s the thing. I believe that hypnosis is mostly suggestion, but that suggestion is very powerful. So as I read the first half of the book, I couldn’t help but be surprised *sarcasm alert* that a Freudian/Jungian therapist gets a high hit rate of genitalia and parental complexes. [It’s simply a trope of proliferate and priviledged talk-therapy, at this point.]
As I got into the individual cases – which I think are all/mostly hospital patients – I felt far more generous towards the endeavour; though special attention and a novel form of art therapy alone could probably explain any improvements just as well as ‘hypnography’.
It is challenging to gauge how un/official these vintage anecdotal studies were, and I try to clear my mind of the specifics of the socioeconomic circumstances of the times and places to give past hypnotic subjects a bit of dignity and privacy back. Because Ainslie himself dives fully down the rabbit hole on all sorts of aspects of hypnosis and therapy. So if you’re a gung-ho hypnotherapist who’s wondered about the different reactions and resistances to inductions, then this is indeed an informative read. There’s also plenty of thoughts about painting set-up and paraphernalia (PLASTIC TABLECLOTH REQUIRED) if you fancy a crack at hypnography itself.
A penultimate chapter contains side notes on hypnography, including “two incidents which might be interpreted as evidence of telepathic communication between therapist and the patient.” This involved the therapist writing – accidentally the first time – a number and the patient replicating it in their paintings, unseen.
Alas, in the quiet of a treatment room, this is perfectly achievable – whether the patient does it consciously or unconsciously. It’s quite sweet that Ainslie was so impressed with these phenomena he had to remind himself the patient was there for treatment rather than psychic experimentation! He later arranged witness of further trials, but all five failed.
It made me smile that our copy, an ex-library book, had been marked up with heavy black exclamation marks in the few instances where a typo appears.
